Khaleda Zia (1946-2025): Bangladesh’s first woman head of state was a walking contradiction

She became only the second woman ever elected prime minister in a Muslim-majority country, leading a party that liked to cast itself as the centre-right antidote to the Awami League's secular nationalism.

By the time her Bangladesh Nationalist Party returned to power in 2001, she cut an unambiguously modern figure: bright georgette saris, a carefully lifted bouffant, bold lipstick when the mood struck, and eyebrows that were thin and sharply arched. Conservatives clutched their pearls, but the party she inherited after the assassination of her husband, President Ziaur Rahman, happily relied on those same conservatives for votes.

Under her watch the Bangladesh Nationalist Party forged alliances with Jamaat-e-Islami and other hardcore Islamist factions, and she persuaded clerics who might have deemed women's leadership un-Islamic, to accept hers.

Was she then a closet liberal or an architect of resurgent Islamism more visible in Bangladesh today? As with much about Begum Khaleda Zia, Bangladesh's first ever female head of government, the truth sat somewhere in the middle.

In office, she pushed strongly for girls' education, making schooling compulsory with bursaries up to eighth grade. In a 1993 interview with the New York Times, she defended the country's daughters and spoke of Bangladesh's milder, more accommodating strain of Islam. Her government took an uncommonly tough stance on child marriage – executive magistrates raided villages to stop under-age marriages, a zeal rarely shown before or since. It stood in sharp contrast to Sheikh Hasina – her rival – who would later argue for weakening the minimum age bar for girls.

Perhaps her most consequential move for women was strengthening domestic violence legislation by setting up a dedicated tribunal, which resulted in precautionary pre-trial jailing of numerous husbands, often on disputed grounds. The move was sweeping, contentious, and, in the eyes of supporters, transformative.

Crucially, because it came from her, a leader trusted by the right, it passed with far less uproar than it would have if proposed by the Awami League. On many such occasions, she used her conservative credentials to quietly advance reforms that the religious right itself would otherwise have resisted.

What shaped these impulses is harder to trace. Bangladesh does not do political biography particularly well. Khaleda herself once acknowledged that she had no formal higher education; there is no record of her going to college. Married at 15 to a photogenic young officer in the Pakistan Army, she spent her early years moving between military postings. Did her truncated schooling fuel her enthusiasm for educating girls? Did early marriage shape her opposition to child marriage? She never said, and her public life allowed little room for introspection.

Born in 1946 to a modest businessman in Feni, Khaleda came of age as the subcontinent convulsed. After the 1965 war, in which her husband fought for Pakistan, she gave birth to her first son, Tarique. By 1971, when Ziaur Rahman defected and joined Bangladesh's independence struggle, she went into hiding with her children – only to be discovered and detained by Pakistani forces until the war's end.

Those years imprinted an image of austerity. Neighbours in the military quarters recalled her fussing over the price of rice and meat. Even after Zia seized power in 1977 and rose to the presidency, the family lived without excess. When he was assassinated in 1981, the party Zia founded fell briefly into the hands of technocrats – until, unexpectedly, it turned to Khaleda.

She was made senior vice-president, and soon became the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's focal point of resistance to General Ershad's dictatorship. While her then-ally Hasina opted for compromise, Khaleda did not. The widow of a popular army chief was not easily intimidated, and the generals knew it. Her stubbornness earned her the nickname “Uncompromising Leader”, a reputation that propelled her to victory in the 1991 election, surprising many who had assumed an Awami League win.

Her first term now looks like a rare liberal interlude in Bangladesh's politics: a freer press and academia, brash new newspapers, creative ferment. Yet, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's roots – part military, part Muslim League – meant it remained detached from minorities and leaned towards a Muslim majoritarian doctrine. It did not help that Khaleda's majority was only secured with Jamaat-e-Islami's support for reserved women's seats. The Awami League, by contrast, styled itself as the guardian of Bengali cultural nationalism: the press, the arts, the intelligentsia.

Despite the differences, civility was still present. Hasina appeared alongside Khaleda at Tarique's wedding, a scene that would become unimaginable years later. Khaleda was softer spoken than Hasina, but Hasina was far less reserved. Khaleda avoided personal insults that Hasina freely deployed, yet she would not cook for guests as Hasina often did. The contrast in personalities was stark, their collision inevitable.

When the Awami League and Jamaat-e-Islami demanded the institutionalisation of the caretaker government system – even after the notorious Magura by-election – she resisted, allowing the opposition ample justification to leave parliament and take to the streets. Bangladesh's toxic street-first political culture owes much to that moment.

She relented eventually, but it came too late. After boycotts, she was forced to hold a second general election in the same year in 1996, which she lost. In opposition, she sharpened her anti-India rhetoric, and campaigned against the Chittagong Hill Tracts peace accord, though her own government had negotiated similar terms. These stances hardened into the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's territorial nationalist doctrine: more pro-military and sharply anti-India.

It was also during that era, that her colleagues started celebrating her birthday on August 15, the anniversary of the massacre that wiped out almost all of Hasina's family. Dubious even as a date, it was repugnant at best, vindictive at worst, and she took far too long to end the practice.

Her return to power in 2001 – this time with Jamaat and other Islamists formally in tow – unfolded under a darker cloud. In unsigned party posters, Hasina was shown receiving a traditional Indian-style welcome – a red tilak pressed onto her forehead, flowers draped around her – imagery that made her appear almost like a Hindu bride. The communal insinuation was unmistakable.

After the Bangladesh Nationalist Party won the election, widespread reports emerged about violence against Hindu communities. Indian separatists found a safer haven in Dhaka, which piqued the neighbouring bully. Perception of corruption spread and became widespread. Jihadi terrorism intensified. Opposition leaders were targeted: Hasina survived a deadly bomb attack; others did not. In response, Khaleda complained of conspiracies more than she ordered persuasive investigations.

Under pressure from the West amid the global war on terror, Khaleda crushed several extremist outfits. She disliked the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she bristled at what she viewed as India's expanding reach. “If patriotism meant standing up to India,” a colleague later said, “she was a giant of a patriot.”

In governance, she was not her husband, who famously kept his family at arm's length from government. Khaleda, by contrast, made her sister a cabinet minister and a retired military officer brother a member of parliament, who became so influential that he was said to dictate many military promotions.

It was also she who created the Rapid Action Battalion, a special police unit meant to tame crime, but soon crowned “death squad” for extrajudicial killings. Rumour has it she personally approved its ominous, dark dress code: black uniforms, sunglasses, bandana-style headgear instead of standard caps. Creating the Rapid Action Battalion was arguably Khaleda's biggest mistake – one entirely of her own making. Under Hasina, it would become even more ruthless, targeting the Bangladesh Nationalist Party at times. Khaleda later called for its abolition, but never apologised for creating it.

By 2007, as her term wound down and tensions over voter-roll manipulation and the caretaker system escalated, the military intervened. The generals she had trusted and promoted turned against her. Both she and Hasina were arrested. Generals supported a breakaway faction of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party as her party teetered. Her elder son, Tarique Rahman – already painted as the embodiment of the country's dynastic politics and corruption – was tortured and then exiled to London.

When the military finally relented and prepared to hold elections, she was drained and reluctant to compete without her full slate. She ran anyway, losing badly, though she won every seat she contested herself: she never lost a constituent election in her life.

The next 15-and-a-half years were grim.

The Awami League grew increasingly authoritarian. She was evicted from her long-time residence as cases piled up. Bangladesh Nationalist Party activists and those of its allies disappeared or were executed. At the height of the crackdown, Bangladesh Nationalist Party members faced millions of criminal charges – many false or patently absurd – with some senior leaders burdened with more than 500 cases each. Hasina's political vengeance went on to define much of Khaleda's existence.

In turn, Khaleda leaned more heavily on Islamist allies. When Hasina launched the war-crimes tribunals – which mainly targeted Jamaat figures and a few from the Bangladesh Nationalist Party's right flank – she sided with Jamaat and rode the rising tide of conservative sentiment. She dismissed the Shahbagh Square movement, which demanded the death penalty for those on trial, as an “infidel square”. The remark poured fuel on an already volatile climate in which atheist bloggers, some prominently associated with the protests, were targeted by jihadists, leaving scores dead. Under her quiet blessings, Hefazat-e-Islam grew extraordinarily influential. In 2013, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party swept all major city corporation polls, its success owed partly to Hefazat's reach.

Alarmed, Hasina refused to reinstate the caretaker system she had abolished. Khaleda's Bangladesh Nationalist Party took to the streets with violence; then more violence. Intercepted call records at the time revealed Khaleda herself directing leaders from a war room. The tactic failed – and left an ugly public memory: scores killed in arson attacks, their charred bodies seared into the national consciousness.

Her younger son, Arafat Rahman Koko, died in exile in Malaysia. In 2018, just ahead of the general election, she herself was jailed on a minor corruption charge. Imprisoned, her health deteriorated: chronic kidney and liver ailments, long hospital stays, and repeated pleas for treatment abroad. Hasina refused to let her leave Dhaka. “She is almost 80. It's time to die – no need for all this crying,” Hasina said then, casually cruel. Sympathy swung instantly to Khaleda.

During the pandemic, she was allowed home under conditions that resembled house arrest. She kept quiet. Her family had privately appealed to Sheikh Rehana for relief; Hasina relented only because she believed it made Khaleda look weak. “I let her go home out of mercy,” Hasina boasted at a rally.

Following the summer uprising of 2024, Hasina fled the country, and the interim government's first acts included dismissing the charges against Khaleda. Soon after, she was flown to London for treatment, where she reunited with Tarique.

In her brief public remarks, she did not attack Hasina. She did not mention her at all. That restraint was striking: Hasina had called her a thief and the mother of a thief, accused her of stealing from orphans, mocked her as a school dropout, suggested her liver problems stemmed from alcohol, and during her eviction, had pornographic magazines and whisky bottles planted in her fridge – props the Awami League then circulated nationwide. She even mocked Khaleda's appearance, hinted at a secret marriage and insinuated affairs, all deeply offensive in Bangladeshi society. Khaleda, for her part, had maintained a warm relationship with Hasina's husband, never aiming personal insults at the couple.

The contrast in temperament could not have been starker.

Lately, in private, she spoke of wanting to contest the upcoming general election. But in her final months she was frail and wheelchair-bound. She no longer wore her trademark saris and kept her hair fully covered. Whether it reflected a turn towards greater piety common at an old age or simply an adaptation to a country where many more women veil than when she first took office, was hard to tell.

Khaleda died at 79, at Evercare Hospital in the capital's Bashundhara neighbourhood, on the eve of Bangladesh's next chapter in its elusive journey towards democracy. For a leader once caricatured as rigid and inscrutable, her legacy is far more layered: a conservative icon who pushed women's rights; a political widow who outmanoeuvred generals; an uncompromising figure who sometimes relented at great cost. A walking contradiction, right until the end.

This article was first published on Netra News.

Source: Scroll
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